A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

I do want to thank everyone who buys something through my little Amazon link -- partly because I get a nickel or so out of every purchase, but mostly because I can then find out what you folks bought, and I'm a nosy guy.

I might examine Amazon purchases on a monthly basis from this point...or I might forget. We'll see. I was going to give all of the numbers, until I realized that would highlight just how pitiful those numbers actually are. So, instead, I'll just mention a couple of interesting highlights.

Unsurprisingly, most of the sales are books, and all of them this month were from Amazon itself rather than third-party sellers. Leaving out a few books where I know exactly who bought them and why, most of them are things I mentioned one way or another -- a whole slew of "Dresden Files" books, ten copies (!) of Marjorie Liu's Darkness Calls, P.J. O'Rourke's Driving Like Crazy, Jim Morrow's Shambling Towards Hiroshima. But a couple of you bought books I didn't expect, like the new collection of Terry Moore's Echo comic, or Dragonbreath or C.C. Finlay's Traitor to the Crown.

There were a few Kindle editions, but I'm not going to mention them; I noticed that I'm currently getting a 0% referral fee on them, and so even a million of them wouldn't make me a penny. Yet another reason for me to say "Screw e-books."

And there were a few single-track mp3 downloads, though, oddly, none of them had anything to do with anything I'd blogged about. (They were mostly songs from Fame, for whatever reason.)

2 comments:

There are times when I am amazed by the numbers, or disappointed. As a first time published author it's very interesting and frustrating at the same time. Check out my first and recently released novel, Long Journey to Rneadal. This exciting tale is a romantic action adventure in space and is more about the characters than the technology.